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Canada will burn (,) praise Allah.” Five words defacing a Toronto War Memorial on Remembrance Day, sent shock waves through the country. Memorials to our war dead have been vandalized before, but by petty thieves stealing metal plaques. This, however, was the first time hostility towards Canada was demonstrated, albeit with an Islamic angle.

Like most Muslim Canadians, I cringed at the implications of this act. How much more will the ordinary Canuck take before, as the Quebecois put it, they reach “le point de bascule.”

The reaction so far has been a numbed silence. The usual suspects screaming “Islamophobia” at any slight to Islam, were silent. No protest, not even a whimper. It was left to the lonely liberal voice of the Muslim Canadian Congress to denounce the act.

So addicted are Muslims to conspiracy theories that within an hour of the reported desecration, Suraia Sahar insinuated on Twitter the defacing was a “false flag” operation — meaning non-Muslims had defaced the memorial and made it appear to be the work of Muslims.

The far-fetched conspiracy theory could not be dismissed outright, except that the same Suraia Sahara had just a few hours earlier, disrupted the annual Remembrance Day ceremony at Old City Hall, chanting slogans against the Canadian Forces.

Not only did the hijab-clad Sahar shout slogans in the midst of the two-minute silence being observed for the war dead, she and another Muslim student from York, Laila Rashidie opened up a banner condemning Canadian troops for killing Taliban terrorists in the 2006 Operation Medusa.

Twelve Canadian soldiers died in that battle. However, for these two young women who were either born in Canada or came here as children from Afghanistan, in the battle of Panjwaii some 30 kilometres west of Kandahar city, the enemy was not the Taliban — it was Canada.

The two may not have committed treason in the eyes of the law, but to those that fought valiantly in Operation Medusa, both Laila Rashidie and Suraia Sahar are fifth columnists.

It wasn’t just the banner that was hurtful nor the disruption during the two-minute silence with profanities that was provocative, it was what the two young ladies had done in the cybersphere leading up to, and after the events of Nov. 11 that deserve our attention.

While trying to recruit supporters for their protest, Laila Rashidie shared a poster on Twitter and Facebook that screamed: “F**k The Troops.”

After a brief jostling match with ordinary folks upset at the desecration of Canada’s most solemn moment of the year, Sahar unveiled her racist hatred when she described the senior citizens who had come to remember their war dead as “a mob of old white men.”

This year’s Remembrance Day event should alert us to the danger of not standing up to the political ideology of Islamism. While most media is scared to challenge it for fear of being labelled as racists, Salma Siddiqui, President of the Muslim Canadian Congress is not:

“These Muslim students of York University are a disgrace to Canada’s one million Muslims and should be exposed for who they are: Hate mongers who have misunderstood Canadians’ civility for cowardice.”

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In Khaled Hosseini’s soul-piercing novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, the character Nana, a poor, unwed mother, tells her five-year-old daughter, Mariam: “Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”